Twenty years after being convicted of the rape of a teenage girl, Ray Schenkel is released, much to the dismay of retired detective William Dorsey. When a teenage girl is raped on the route Schenkel would have taken home, Stabler goes undercover as a recently paroled sex offender so that he can get into the same therapy group as Schenkel, and the same halfway house. Cragen worries that Stabler may be getting in over his head.

Benson saves April Troost from committing suicide, but feels responsible when Troost dies during the trial of the man she accuses of raping her and getting her pregnant. It isn't long before detectives learn that Barclay Pallister wasn't the only man April picked up in a bar who has no recollection of sleeping with her, and the squad realizes that Troost was no victim. Their search takes them from prospective parents looking to adopt her child to the men she drugged and accosted to the sperm center she used to work at, which ends up at the center of the case. This crossover continues on Law & Order S16E02 Flaw (II).

Benson is on her way out for the evening when a call comes in from a little girl who says she's all alone. While trying to draw the girl out, Benson is drawn deeper into the little girl's life, and although the other officers begin to suspect the whole thing may be some sick joke, Benson is convinced that the little girl is the real deal. By talking to Maria, Benson is able to ferret enough information from her so that they have a place to start, but Maria's captor has an affinity for electronics and has done everything he can to make sure that no one can find the little girl he bought and paid for.

When the teenage son of Stabler's old partner comes under suspicion for attacking a classmate, Stabler's inability to treat this like any other case gets him suspended.

The discovery of the bodies of two young gay men who were both meth addicts as well as victims of a new strain of AIDS that can kill its victims in less than a year leads to an investigation. Tutuola learns that his son, Ken, is gay, and has difficulty accepting it, even though he and Benson end up going to Ken for help with infiltrating an anti-meth group. The group's leader, Gabriel, soon becomes their top suspect when the squad realises that the two men died because they passed the disease on.

After a six-year-old boy dies in a school shooting, detectives trace the gun used back to a white supremacist's gun shop. Munch and Tutuola both face hatred and prejudice from the major suspects in the case, but their investigation soon takes them from the man who pulled the trigger back to the gun shop owner, who makes no bones about his hatred of anyone who isn't white.

After the bones of a boy who disappeared in 1978 are found at a playground, Stabler, still visibly recovering from a recent gunshot wound, teams up with Vizcarrando to determine the boy's identity, which leads them to a cold case involving four missing Puerto Rican boys that were never found.

After a dating service is linked to three rapes, Olivia goes undercover to ferret out the rapist and meets Mike Jergens, a surgeon who enjoys controlling the women in his life. The detectives are soon led to his girlfriend, Cora Kennison, but shortly after testifying in the grand jury hearing Cora marries Mike. After Cora attempts suicide, Mike fights her mother, Virginia, to unplug her feeding tube.